


Billets-Doux

by avocadomoon



Category: Little Women (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26490640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avocadomoon/pseuds/avocadomoon
Summary: "I can't tell if you're being obtuse or trying to let me down easy," Laurie said, "you're so hard to read sometimes, Ames, I think you have to be doing it on purpose. But then you look at me like that - " he reached out again, and Amy's breath caught in her throat, freezing in place as he touched her face again, in the same spot as before - "and I know you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Because you spend so much time talking yourself down from things, denying yourself things, that you start to believe that you never had them in the first place. Is that what you're doing with me?"
Relationships: Theodore Laurence/Amy March
Comments: 36
Kudos: 358
Collections: Het Swap Exchange 2020





	Billets-Doux

**Author's Note:**

  * For [badritual](https://archiveofourown.org/users/badritual/gifts).



It really wasn't so bad, now that Amy could see what Meg had done to the back. Plus combined with her nose ring, it sort of made her look dangerous, Amy decided. She squinted at herself in the mirror, poked her own forehead, made a face. The hair was a secondary concern. Hardly noticeable at all. The bangs were the worst part, and Meg had trimmed them even for her, and assured her multiple times that they were flattering.

"You should sue that girl," Meg said, handing her a beer and a smile once Amy departed the bathroom with trembling courage, waiting at the foot of the stairs for her like the wonderful big sister she was. "Emotional distress? Physical assault. Does cutting hair count as assault? It should. We should Google that."

"She was drunk, she apologized," Amy mumbled, and eyed the doorway to the living room with trepidation. "Is Jo here yet?"

"No," Meg said reassuringly, pressing her warm palm against the back of Amy's shoulder. Her engagement ring - still not resized yet, something about finding a jeweler who could handle an antique - had twisted around backwards on her finger, and Amy could feel the stone pressing against her skin. "I don't think she's coming. You know Laurie and his roommate said they were going to stop by."

Amy groaned and took a long pull of the beer. 

"You don't have to talk to him either," Meg said hastily. She stopped short before the entrance to the bustling party, tucking Amy into the shadow next to the large mirror opposite the front door, the same one that Amy had lingered in front of on countless mornings as a kid, checking her makeup and hair while waiting on the school bus. It was gigantic and ugly, with an ostentatious, tacky gold frame that Marmee claimed was the height of luxury _back in her day,_ imitating Aunt March's stiff, New England drawl. Their father used to threaten to break it all the time, and one afternoon in the summer after Amy's freshman year of high school Jo and Laurie had knocked it off the wall while playing frisbee inside the house (something Marmee had explicitly forbidden them to do, after the incident with the flower vase), and all three of them - Amy, Jo, and a frantically apologetic Laurie - had painstakingly repaired the single crack at the bottom with resin and vowed never to tell a soul. Marmee had noticed within the first thirty seconds, of course, but she hadn't said anything. She just caught Amy's eye at dinner and rolled her eyes as Jo and Laurie loudly told a story about their lovely day far away from the house, _no we weren't at home at all, and Amy was with us the whole time wasn't she Teddy, why yes she was Josephine! Wonderful day at the museum! Amy got to see the water lilies again!_ and to this day, Amy doesn't think Marmee's said a word about it.

Amy grimaced again, thinking of her preteen self, eagerly helping them in their cover up, flustered by their attention and frantic to be included. Humiliating as it always was, to remember how transparent she'd been, but doubly so when she looked like a fourteen-year-old boy who'd just discovered hair clippers for the first time. She fussed with her bangs in the mirror, frowning. In this light they looked even more like TERF bangs. Her previous confidence was gone; she looked _terrible,_ and the party was going to be wretched, and Laurie was going to _laugh_ at her. She was doomed. 

"Stop. Stop it," Meg said, tugging her hand away. "Look at me. You look fine. It flatters your cheekbones."

"You're not serious," Amy said gloomily. "I look like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

Meg bit her lip against her smile. "You do not. You look like a punk rocker."

"I look like I tripped and fell into a lawnmower!"

Meg broke, her laughter bubbling out like champagne. "But at least she didn't shave your head completely? She could've shaved your head completely, Amy."

Amy laughed too, clapping her palms over her face. Meg pressed her own hands on either side of Amy's head and pulled her close, smacking a loud kiss against her ugly, TERF bangs. Amy giggled again, and then wrinkled her nose at the cloying perfume smell that clung to Meg's hair. "Oh God, did you have to hug Aunt March already? You smell like the makeup department at Nordstrom's."

"She came over early to help with the flower arrangements," Meg said, rolling her eyes. "So, see? You're ugly and I smell. We're a perfect match. We'll sit together at dinner and be the ugly ducklings of the family."

Amy laughed again, at the idea that Meg could ever qualify as an 'ugly duckling.' "Wouldn't that mean that Aunt March would sit with us?"

"She's too rich to be ugly," Meg said wryly, "even though she is." Amy laughed again, a little guiltily this time. "You feel better?"

"Yes. Oh God, I'm sorry," Amy blurted, "it's just a haircut, I don't know why I'm being so dramatic - "

"Oh please. It's the perfect excuse to avoid John's boss. He's here tonight too," Meg said with a shudder, "you know, the one who hit on me at the Christmas party? John didn't want to invite him, but - well, he's his _boss,_ and there was some sort of staff meeting the other day and a bunch of his coworkers were asking, and he felt like he had to invite all of them. So I'm gonna stick with you tonight," Meg decided, looping their arms together. "It's not really an official engagement party, we'll have a real one once Dad gets home. John will be caught up the whole time with his brother's family anyway."

Amy pressed her cheek momentarily to Meg's arm, guiltily grateful for her support. "Still."

"Still nothing. It _really_ doesn't look that bad, you know," Meg said, pulling Amy upright in front of the mirror. They posed for a second, admiring themselves - Meg looked radiant as she always did, her brown hair in the same, proper little chignon that she always wore it in, but dressed up with a daisy from Marmee's flower box. Her dress was blue and her eyes were bright and happy; Amy loved her so much, admired her so intensely it sometimes made her feel nauseous. "You look like...an art student. Which is what you are! So it's fine."

The bad haircut in question _did_ sort of look deliberate, as if it were a _choice_ that Amy had made, which was the main reason behind her distress. It was short, shorn right at the base of her neck, and with the hair on top brushed out and fluffed up with hairspray, it looked like Amy had an almost-fashionable pixie cut. The shaved part above her ear had also been evened out into a triangle shape, thanks to Meg, and it looked like a stylish undercut rather than a mistake. The bangs really were the only part that looked out of place, and Meg assured her it wouldn't take long for them to grow out, and then they could style it into something more cohesive. Her roommate - an illustration major who spent much more time smoking weed in the dorm than she did illustrating - had apologized profusely, but Amy still wasn't speaking to her. Amy still wasn't exactly sure she believed her when she said Amy had been extremely drunk, but still _conscious,_ when the decision to start cutting hair had occurred. It was only marginally comforting that the haircut her roommate had given _herself_ was ten times worse. 

"I'm never drinking again," Amy swore, and took a long, bracing drink of beer. Meg snorted. "I feel weird in this dress. Like I need a cardigan or something."

Meg tugged the spaghetti strap back up onto Amy's shoulder, and squeezed her arm. "Aunt March is gonna think you look like a hooligan no matter how much skin you show. Might as well embrace it."

"I'm not showing skin by choice! You made me wear this!"

"And you look beautiful," Meg said. "Come on. Ready?"

"No," Amy said morosely, taking another drink of beer. "Help me finish this. I can't walk into the room with a bad haircut _and_ a beer."

Meg drained the last fourth of the drink and abandoned the bottle on the side table, right next to Marmee's flower vase, without even a blink. "Nobody's going to say anything, Ames. And if they do, I'll kick them." Meg squeezed her shoulder, her eyes wide and sincere, meeting Amy's in the mirror. "I'll kick them right in the _face,_ Amy."

Amy laughed. "I know you would, babe."

Meg smiled. "Marmee made margarita ice cubes for us," she said, her voice going quiet and conspiratorial. "The blue tray, in the back of the freezer, beneath a bag of frozen tater tots. Don't tell anyone else."

"God bless Marmee," Amy said, with another laugh. 

"God bless Marmee," Meg repeated, with the intonation of a prayer. Which was, Amy figured, exactly what it was. 

John was going to be a good brother-in-law, Amy figured. They all thought he was terribly boring at first, until one night at dinner when Jo was teasing him mercilessly about his job (a little drunk at the time, and just as blunt and unaware of social graces as she always was), and he got fed up and snapped at her right back, making some terribly witty crack about her own job at the time, which had been an embarrassing receptionist position at a Wall Street law firm. Jo went red at everyone's laughter, but then in the next second she rolled her eyes and announced to the table that she deserved that. 

"You're alright, Johnny," she'd proclaimed, and just like that, it was decided. Jo was, if nothing else, the arbiter of good taste in the March family. So if she said it, it must be so. 

It was pretty shitty of Jo not to come, Amy thought, edging around the party tentatively, wincing every time she caught Aunt March's eye, who had looked so horrified at Amy's appearance that she literally fanned herself with a napkin. But there'd been some kind of fight, Amy knew, between Jo and Meg, that neither of them wanted to talk about. Amy still emailed with Jo about once a week, and talked to her on the phone less frequently (finding a time when neither of them were in class or at work was increasingly difficult, even though they were back in the same time zone again), and Jo wouldn't breathe a word about it, no matter how much Amy pushed. 

_It's nothing,_ was Jo's last message, sent late last night at almost 3 AM. Amy just knew Jo had to have been tipsy, coming back from a party or something - a ridiculously hip one, no doubt, a poetry slam or a bohemian gathering of New York literati - but her sentences had been as elegant and articulate as they always were. After Amy's recent experience with overindulging, she resented that skill of Jo's even more than usual. _It's just wedding stuff. Don't worry, Mademoiselle! We'll make up before the big day, I'm sure of it. Now I know this haircut you've told me about can't be as terrible as you made it sound, because I heard from Marmee that you almost made Dad faint. Is it scandalous?! Dad loves scandalous haircuts. Remember when I dyed Beth's hair blue?_

Jo's mention of Beth was pointed, a distraction tactic, but it still worked. Jo was the only one who ever talked about her, even now, three years on. Amy could never stand the look on Marmee's face whenever someone said her name, and Meg still couldn't bear to talk about her without crying. So Amy had resentfully left Jo on read, a little put out at Beth being used in such a way. Not that Jo had meant it spitefully, but - it was the principle of the thing. 

Laurie wasn't there either. Amy spotted his roommate talking to John - he was a friend of Jo's from college, another literati type named Henry who'd needed a room in Boston after school, by all accounts he and Laurie got on swimmingly of course - and had been on edge for awhile, searching the dense crowd for the wild curls of Laurie's hair, but she hadn't seen him. Amy had only just relaxed into a dull conversation with one of John's insufferably British cousins, thinking Henry had come alone and she might just get through this night unscathed when she heard a pair of boots on the floor behind her and felt every muscle in her body turn to stone. 

"Sorry to interrupt," Laurie said brightly, in the voice he used when he was about to say something that he thought was hilarious, "but Amy, I think you might have misplaced the bottom half of your hair. Do you need help looking for it?"

Amy ground her teeth and watched the realization pass over John's cousin's face: the transition from _who is this jerk_ to _who is this hot jerk_ to _oh my God that's Senator Laurence's grandson and he's a hot jerk!_ never got any less annoying. "He's not usually this funny," Amy told her. "Most of the time he just makes knock-knock jokes."

"Sorry," John's cousin said, practically drooling at the mouth, "but aren't you - "

"Nope!" Laurie said cheerfully, and plucked Amy's drink right out of her hand. She made an offended noise that turned into a squeak, as he snagged her arm and pulled her down off the landing of the stairs she'd been standing on. "I get that all the time. Do you mind if I borrow this urchin for a second? The coppers are after her, I heard she stole some bread or something. Very strange."

" _Coppers?_ " Amy said incredulously. "That's embarrassingly wrong no matter _what_ book you're attempting to reference - "

"Hip hop, tally-ho, guv'nah," Laurie said, in a truly atrocious British accent. John's cousin - authentically British - narrowed her eyes at him, all interest vanishing like magic off her face. "Let's kick boots before they catch up. Luv. Little luv - "

"Oh my God," Amy said miserably, tugging him away. "I'm very sorry. Nice to meet you. Laurie, do you ever _shut up_ , Jesus Christ - "

Laurie was laughing, drawing eyes as he always did, as she pulled him through the living room and out onto the patio, which had the benefit of fresh air and the absence of Aunt March, who was already talking loudly about dilettantes and the irresponsibility of the nouveau riche. "I'll assume from the look on her face that British people don't say 'little luv.' That was a guess on my part. Ames!" He dug in his heels and made her stop so he could dump out the last of her drink into one of Marmee's potted ferns. Amy gasped and smacked him. "Were you drinking _bourbon?_ I can't believe you."

"It was one of the hot toddy cocktails, you idiot," Amy said, tugging her arm away. Feeling self-conscious suddenly on the porch, much quieter than inside the house, she pulled her arm out of Laurie's grip and put her hands on her hips, resisting the urge to wrap them around her stomach instead. "Are you drunk?"

"Why do you always ask if I'm drunk when I'm in a good mood?" Laurie said, not sounding offended at all. "No, I'm not drunk. I'm just happy to see you! Your _hair_ , Ames, holy shit."

Amy touched her bare neck, feeling even more self-conscious than before. "I guess you heard what happened," she said. 

"What a jerk," Laurie said, tilting his head, his face sympathetic. Amy felt a sharp pain in her chest, as she always did when Laurie stood this close, and looked at her with gentleness. "You should sue."

"That's what Meg said."

"Well, you should! I'm in law school, you know," Laurie said, "which means I know a few lawyers. Good ones, even."

"Does such a thing exist?" Amy teased. "My father says the only good lawyer is a - "

Laurie gasped and tried to cover her mouth with one hand; seeing this coming, Amy leaped away, laughing, and in the ensuing scuffle, they knocked over the potted fern. The few other party guests, milling about in the backyard, watched with interest, and Amy huffed and stood a few feet away while Laurie attempted to right the pot, shaking her head at him and ignoring his laughter completely. 

"You're a terrible influence," she said, grimacing at the dirt on his hands, which he promptly wiped off on the grass, still grinning like he was getting away with something. "Poor Meg. I'll have to let her know that she'll need security at her wedding, to keep the local riff-raff from gatecrashing. Such a shame that you managed to - hey!"

Laurie snickered, managing to wipe both hands on her dress before she darted away. "Sorry, did you say something? All I heard was this sad, horn noise. Like a big balloon of hot air deflating. Ow - no hitting!"

"You're impossible and I didn't miss you at all," Amy said, her cheeks flushed at the lie. Her heart was racing, her skin felt like it had pins and needles all over, in all the places it was exposed to Laurie's eyes. He was wearing a terribly stylish waistcoat over his dress shirt, and no jacket, and his hair was mussed from the wind. He was smiling at her like they'd never had that fight, like he didn't even remember it - and maybe he didn't, Amy figured. She hadn't expected him to pretend like it hadn't happened, but maybe that's how he did things. Maybe it was just an argument, to his mind, just a tiff between friends, and all of Amy's devastation over the past three months was just more dramatics. Stupid little Amy, getting so worked up over her big sister's best friend, as usual. She got so sick of herself sometimes she could cry. 

"Now that's not true, and I know it," Laurie said, laughing again. Amy bit her lip so she wouldn't smile back, but she knew he could tell. He always could. "Come on, it's been ages. You didn't answer any of my emails! Can we talk a little?"

"You didn't email me," Amy said, startled. She glanced over at the sliding glass door, where she could see Meg standing with Marmee, eyeing her with some concern over John's shoulder. Amy rolled her eyes, and Meg smiled, reassured. "I would've replied."

"I did too," Laurie insisted, sounding a little put out. He took a step closer, his face oddly insistent. "You didn't get them? I sent them to your gmail. Maybe I had it wrong." He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, muttering. "Amy dot March, right?"

Amy rolled her eyes. "Amelia dot March," she said. "I use my full name for school, remember?"

"Oh, shit," Laurie said, looking sheepish. "No. I forgot."

Amy snorted. 

"Alright, alright. I'm an idiot, I know," Laurie said, sliding his phone back in his pocket. "Well, somewhere out there, there's another Amy March who's been reading all my stupid apologies for the past three months. Hope she enjoyed it."

Amy felt herself waver, at the word _apologies._ "Did you think I was still angry with you?" she asked. 

"Well, yeah. Did you think I wasn't sorry?" Laurie asked incredulously. 

"Well, yeah," Amy said, and they both grinned at each other. "Sorry you're an idiot."

"Sorry your email is confusing," Laurie replied, and took her hand. "Can we bail? Will Meg be mad? I'd like to talk to you."

Amy felt her heartbeat quicken again. "She wouldn't be _mad,_ no, but - "

"Then let's go. Please, Amy," Laurie said, glancing over her shoulder to the door. Whoever he saw there made his face grow more serious, the laughter fading away completely. "It's been shit, not talking to you. I only came tonight to see if you were ready to forgive me. We'll just go next door - my grandpa's in DC, it'll be empty."

Alone at the Senator's house with Laurie - it was the beginning of every wet dream fantasy Amy's had since she turned fourteen and discovered her own sex drive. Her face felt hot. "Just for a little bit. I should get back here and help Marmee clean up."

Laurie crossed his heart. "My noble lady," he said, this time in a terrible Russian accent, "I shall not take any more of your time than is absolutely necessary for my peace of mind."

Amy squinted at him. "Were you trying to do the bad guy from Anastasia just then?"

"Yeah. No go?"

She shook her head.

"Fine." Laurie sighed. "As critical as ever, I see."

"It's for your own good," Amy assured him. 

"You look like Anne Hathaway in _Les Mis,_ " Laurie said, holding the door for her with his free arm cocked at his waist like a gentleman. "I see what you mean about the bangs, but they'll grow out quick. She was right, it suits you."

"Don't try to make me feel better, I know it's terrible," Amy said, startling a little at the echo of her voice in the foyer of the house. Amy could count on one hand how many times she's actually been inside; Laurie almost never invited them over unless it was for some formal occasion. _Too big, too cold, too everything,_ he always told them, preferring to make himself a nuisance at the March household instead. Amy grew up with Laurie as much as she grew up with her sisters - poor Beth had thought that he was their cousin until she was about twelve, and even then she wasn't totally convinced until she caught Jo and Laurie kissing one morning in the breakfast nook. 

Amy inhaled sharply, ducking her chin. She wished she hadn't remembered that. 

"Just a bit darker hair and you would be a lovely Eponine," Laurie was saying, leading her deeper into the cavernous house. 

"Anne Hathaway played Fantine, Laurie. And she was dying of syphilis."

"Wait, no, it was tuberculosis."

Amy wrinkled her nose. "I totally thought it was syphilis. Because she was a prostitute, right?"

"Well, whatever. I hate that musical anyway," Laurie said, flipping on lights as he went. Amy blinked at the living room as she followed him through to the kitchen - the furniture was covered in dust cloths. It gave the room an eerie feel. "Do you want something? A drink? We probably have something in the fridge."

Amy shrugged, and Laurie stuck his head in the fridge, emerging with two bottles of sweet tea. "Good? Or something harder?"

Amy shook her head hastily. "I want the raspberry one."

"Then raspberry you shall have, milady," Laurie said, and pushed the door shut with his elbow. "He has all kinds of shit in there. I can't believe he still has the staff coming through now that I'm not living here. He's only home maybe one week out of the month - _maybe._ "

It was true that they hadn't seen the Senator in quite some time, but he'd been in the news recently about a bill he'd co-sponsored, they'd all assumed he was just keeping to himself and avoiding the press. "Maybe he wants you to know you're always welcome," Amy suggested hopefully, and Laurie made a face. "Oh, come on."

"No, no, really, we've been getting along fine lately," Laurie said. "It's just, he's talking about selling the house again."

Amy propped her chin in her hand. "It's going to happen eventually. You told him you didn't want to live in it."

"I know. I guess I just thought _he_ would," Laurie said, leaning against the counter across from her. Amy slid onto one of the high barstools and very carefully did not look at his wrists, lean and tan and very close to her hands on the marble, nor did she stare at his mouth, which was also far too close for her comfort. "I could always tell him I changed my mind, and he would stay here until he died, waiting for me to get married and move in and start filling it up with little Laurie babies. But that would be mean."

"To lie? Yes, it would," Amy agreed primly. "No woman would ever have you."

Laurie mimed a chest wound, collapsing comically against the countertop. Amy choked on a gulp of tea as she laughed, covering her mouth with her elbow. "No, that's too depressing. And too realistic."

"Realistic that he would save the house for you, given even the _slightest_ hope that you would settle down someday?" Amy asked. "Or realistic that you would lie and manipulate him into doing that because you're weirdly emotionally attached to this gigantic mansion that you don't even _like living in?_ "

"Ouch," Laurie said, with a modicum of seriousness that told Amy she'd actually managed to hit a bullseye. "Both. Probably."

She sighed. "Sorry, Laurie, I - "

"No, no. Your brutal - " Laurie coughed to hide a smile that Amy saw anyway. " - some might say _violently_ brutal - honesty is one of my favorite things about you, you know."

Amy took a sullen gulp of tea. "Glad someone likes that about me," she muttered, and Laurie made a clicking noise with his mouth, patting her on the arm gallantly. 

"Plenty of people do," he said, reassuringly. "Present company aside."

It always made Amy uncomfortable when he tried to compliment her, because it reminded her of being sixteen, escorted to Prom by a henpecked Laurie, home on spring break from his first year at college. Her date had ditched her, predictably (Amy had tended to date boys that were as different from Laurie as she could find, which often meant either weed dealers, punk rock drummers, or both) and it was one of the most excruciatingly humiliating experiences of her life, drinking punch with Laurie in her school gym as he tried and failed to cheer her up, dressed in a borrowed tux from her father and looking unfairly handsome and extremely uncomfortable surrounded by her gawking classmates. Painful too, since Amy would've done anything, given anything, to be Laurie's _real_ date - but of course, the only time she's ever gotten anything close to that was because Jo called him in tears and asked for a favor. 

Amy didn't find this out until years later, when she took Jo out for her birthday and they drank cupcake-flavored shots until they were both stumbling home, laughing and holding hands like they rarely did when they were sober. Jo had said a lot of things that night as they lay together on the floor of Amy's dorm, and a lot of them were very painful to hear. Not that Amy ever let onto her that they were. It really wasn't Jo's fault that everything about her life, personality, and talents were designed in God's lab specifically to make Amy feel inadequate. Really. It was Amy's problem first, and she's gotten a lot better over the years about keeping it to herself.

To be his friend was enough, Amy often thought, but sometimes felt the burn of it, especially when they were alone together and he was smiling at her like that. Their fight had stemmed from that same brutal honesty that he claimed to like so much - and Amy did feel wretched about it. But she didn't regret what she said either, because Laurie had needed to hear it, and he knew he'd needed to hear it. If she could only be close to him like this - the person he went to for advice, for a kick in the ass and a knock to the head - she'd take it. It was better than what was between him and Jo now, which was practically nothing. And _miles_ better than being one of his hapless ex-girlfriends, the prim daughters of Senators or the intimidatingly hip artists and musicians he met at nightclubs, slim brunettes with dark eyeliner who popped in and out of Laurie's life like fruit flies. There, and then gone again. Sure, they got a part of him that Amy didn't, but he also hardly ever remembered their names. You had to have some perspective, when it came to unrequited love. 

"I am sorry," she said. "If I'd gotten your emails, I would've replied."

Laurie shrugged. "I'm sorry you didn't expect better of me," he said, more gravely than he usually said anything, which made Amy sit up and take notice. "To think you've spent the last three months thinking I was just ignoring you...Amy, if I've done anything to make you think I'm such a shit friend? I hope you would've told me. I'm being serious."

"No," Amy said, stricken. " _No_ , I just thought I'd hurt your feelings, that's all. You would've had every right not to reach out, Laurie, I was pretty harsh." She grimaced. "It was a fight, we - we fought, and it's not all on you to make the first move, I could've texted you or something. Especially since I was so hard on you."

"I deserved it," Laurie said evenly, and then blinked at her, as if realizing something. "Anyway, I don't mean to make you feel guilty, like it's your fault for...anyway. Sorry." He shook his head. "I'm just saying, because I'm not sure you know. I _like_ it when you tell me when I've fucked up. It's the only way I figure it out, sometimes."

Amy shook her head. "I could've been nicer about it."

"I wasn't exactly giving you the chance to be nice," Laurie said ruefully, quietly. Amy ached with the same exquisite longing she always felt when she looked at him head-on, in these quiet moments, when he wasn't teasing her or joking around. They felt precious to her - the times when he would become introspective (and when they were younger, moody) and just _calm_ for a minute or two, quit bouncing manically off the walls and just _sit_ with her. It was that manic energy that he shared with Jo; Amy often thought they were terrible for each other because they brought out the worst, most irresponsible things in each other sometimes, and then felt very unkind and small for thinking it, so she's never said it out loud. She still wasn't sure if it was a true thought, or just a jealous one. "You'll be proud of me though. I did think about what you said, and you were right, and I know you know that, but I've really buckled down. At school, and everything. Haven't really drank at all in the past three months. And definitely nothing harder." He looked earnest, leaning forward on his elbows at the kitchen island, his eyes wide in his face. "And I am sorry. For all the things I said too, because they weren't exactly kind either."

Amy swallowed the last of her tea, to soften her suddenly dry throat. "Is that what you said in your emails?"

"Some of them," Laurie said. His face twisted with some mysterious emotion that made Amy's heart start to thump wildly again. "Maybe I'm glad you never got them. Some of them were embarrassing. Especially the recent ones, when I thought you were ignoring me."

"I could never ignore you," Amy said, and then flushed at how honest that was. "You're undeniable. A force of nature that cannot be refused, for better or for worse." She smirked at him, feeling only a little shaky on her dismount as she attempted to turn the moment into a joke. "A hurricane, maybe. Tropical Storm Laurie."

"I like that," Laurie said, grinning a little. "Late summer storm. Heavy rain, when it's hot outside. Tornado weather. Sirens at dusk."

Amy shivered a little, watching his hand flex against his drink, feeling a phantom touch against her throat as she watched his thumb go white with pressure against the bottleneck. 

"But you? You're a blizzard," Laurie said. "One of the rare ones that have thunder and lightning."

"A thunder snowstorm?" Amy asked, mouth dry. "Is that a compliment? I can't tell."

"I meant it as one," Laurie said, and then he did something that was both very thrilling and very painful for Amy: he touched her face. Amy held her breath and went hot and cold all over as his palm settled gently against her cheek, debating her options between yanking her face away like he'd tried to hit her and derailing whatever he was about to say, with his face all tender and open and ridiculous like that, or just passing out cold on the spot, keeling forward and hitting her head hard enough against the marble to forget the last sixty seconds of her life entirely. Frozen with indecision between the two choices, Amy forgot to actually decide and thus sat there, breathless, as he said, "are you still with that Fred guy?"

"Um," Amy said, strangled. 

"I saw on Facebook that you - never mind, it's not important," Laurie said, sliding his palm down and touching her shoulder instead, which was just as affecting to Amy as the cheek, sadly. "Sorry to pry. I just - I know I was mean about it but I really wasn't kidding about him, Amy, I've heard things, and - "

"I'm not," Amy said. 

Laurie's hand clenched on her shoulder, and then slowly relaxed again. "You broke up?"

"I was never with him in the first place," Amy said, with some heat. "Which I told you when we fought. If you remember."

"Yeah, but I thought you were just - " Laurie shrugged and his hand fell away, which made Amy want to wilt in relief and dismay, all at the same time. "I thought you liked him. So I thought it was like, a talking thing. A pre-dating, talking thing."

"Maybe it was," Amy said, and Laurie's face did something very weird before he buried it in his hand, rubbing his forehead with his palm with quick, stuttery movements. When he lifted his head again, his face was blank. "But it didn't work out. So."

"Did he," Laurie began, darkly, but whatever he saw on her face - Amy had very little control over it, at the present moment - stopped him. "Never mind. Sorry."

"Stop apologizing, jeez," Amy said, exasperated. "He was fine. It was fine. He was a perfectly fine person, and whatever you've heard about him may or may not be true, I wouldn't know, because we didn't actually spend much time together, really. He went back to California to live with his dad a couple months ago, because I guess he's having health problems. And I haven't heard from him since. Understandably." Amy shrugged. "It wasn't a big deal."

Laurie looked like he was almost vibrating. He gripped the edge of the counter with one hand and rubbed his face again with the other, his curls shaking back and forth with the movement. "Not a big deal," he repeated, sounding strained. "Jesus."

"Well, it wasn't," Amy said, and then scowled. "You're so overprotective sometimes. You know that drives me crazy."

"I was trying to be respectful about it this time!" Laurie cried defensively. "I really was, but then you started in on me about the drinking, and then the yelling started. I don't know. It was like when you can see the car crash coming in a movie, in slow motion, but you can't stop it. Like The Flash, when he runs so fast the world around him almost stops."

"Well, we've apologized for all that already," Amy said, out of sorts and kind of upset, though she couldn't tell what she was upset about exactly. Just a general feeling of hyperawareness, combined with the uncomfortable feeling that she was missing something, and the sharp distress on Laurie's face that seemed so out of place. "What did you see on Facebook, anyway? I haven't put anything on mine in months. Since before we fought."

"Some photo Jo posted," Laurie said with a shrug. "It doesn't matter."

Amy frowned. "I didn't know you were still," she said, and then cut herself off abruptly. 

"Still what?" Laurie asked, frowning.

"Sorry, I thought you still had her blocked. That's all."

"Well," Laurie said, "I unblocked her. We talked a little and it's better now. Not like it was before, but." He shrugged again. "Just a little, mind you. She DM'd me on Instagram about a month ago, I think she was drunk - she just sent me a post from some art magazine her roommate works for, and then I replied and we started going back and forth about it, it wasn't anything serious. Just chatting. But better than nothing, right?"

"Right," Amy said, her heart sinking. She thought about 'Freddie,' as Jo called him - and how ironic, really, how simply fucking perfect, wasn't it, that Amy's attempt to move on was with a man also named Fred, as if the universe herself was conspiring to make everything Amy did a pathetic shadow of her sister - was that why Jo had reached out? Did she want Laurie to look at her accounts again and see the coy pictures she was always posting of Freddie's office and his bookshelves and his cute, one-eyed rescue cat? Having an affair with a professor wasn't _so_ scandalous anymore when one was a witty graduate student with more daring in her little finger than the entire administration's disciplinary board combined - but it was still scandalous. Amy seesawed constantly between thinking it really was real, that Jo was finally _in love_ , and thinking it was just another wild adventure she was going on, having a lark in her last year of the MFA before she faced the increasingly intimidating job market. She'd never _rub it in Laurie's face,_ exactly, but she wasn't above a little passive-aggressive posting here and there to make a point. After their disaster of a two-week sort-of relationship in eleventh grade, she went out with the captain of the lacrosse team and wrapped his pickup truck around a telephone pole one night after a party, and the way Amy and Beth and Meg had found out about it was because she'd put up a selfie of herself in the emergency room, sitting on the guy's lap and laughing with scrapes all over her face. Laurie had been so angry he didn't speak to Jo - and any of them, by proxy - for almost a month. Amy had been furious herself with Jo for the same thing, but for different (and embarrassingly transparent) reasons.

"Anyway she put up this picture of you at Marmee's work thing a couple weeks back, and Fred was tagged in it, but he wasn't in the picture, and I thought - I dunno," Laurie said, "it was weird. I thought maybe he was there with you, that you were like, _dating_ dating. That's all."

"He was there," Amy said blankly, not really following the progression of his thinking there, "you know he works for Marmee's firm. But we weren't dating, I already told you."

"Right. I know that now," Laurie said, and then there was a weird pause. "Are you mad I'm talking to Jo again?"

"Why would I be mad?" Amy said, startled enough to ask. 

"I dunno," Laurie said again, his expression frustratingly neutral. "I just thought you might be."

Unsettled, Amy focused on the empty tea bottles, pushing them together near the edge of the sink. She didn't look up as she spoke. "I think it's great that you're starting to talk again. Finally. I know it's been awkward the last few years since…" she couldn't say it. "But it would be nice if we all could be friends again."

"Since," Laurie repeated, with finality. He sounded rueful, and more than a little frustrated. "Right."

The _since_ was the night of Jo and Laurie's college graduation, an episode that should've been private between them but was unfortunately splashed across the front page of the March family awareness, due to the fact that they'd screamed at each other about it for almost twenty minutes on the front porch while the rest of them awkwardly ate breakfast in the dining room. Amy tried to keep her knowledge limited to the very basics: they'd slept together, and Jo thought it was a mistake. They were drunk and she was sad about moving away, he couldn't have expected her to take it seriously. She was sorry that he got the wrong idea, but pressuring her into a relationship was a jerk move, didn't he know? Hadn't they tried before, and it was a disaster? Wasn't their friendship more important?

Still, Amy knew quite a bit more than that, from things Jo had said, and from the pointed, wounded silence of the past four years on Laurie's side. There was always more to the story when it came to Jo - and Amy didn't think she was being ungenerous by saying so. She was a complicated person, her sister - not an easy one to love sometimes, but who was? Jo had ups and downs that were more mercurial than most people's, but she loved people with endless loyalty, and she didn't give up on them. She was quick to anger, but just as quick to forgiveness (which Amy had tested many, many times). Laurie, by contrast, had a temper so fierce that it was sometimes kind of frightening. When he was done with somebody, hurt to the point that he no longer felt the urge to try - he could be very cold. Not a vengeful, angry coldness, just an...empty one. When he was finished, he was finished, and that was all. It was only Beth's death that had brought him back to the Marches, and even then - he'd seemed almost apathetic about Jo herself, polite but distant, affectionate when they were in a crowd but cool and detached whenever they spoke. Jo had said once, not quite a year ago, _you get one, maybe two chances with Teddy. If you fuck them both up - like I did - he won't give you a third. I admire that about him, really. I always have._

That was, if Amy was being honest, what she thought had happened these past three months. They'd yelled at each other just as loudly as he and Jo had, and for a lot longer, and the things Amy had said were just as personal and wounding, even if they were, as he claimed, things he'd needed to hear. She hadn't reached out herself - hadn't called, or texted, or emailed - because she was deathly afraid that she wouldn't get an answer. The uncertainty was preferable because at least then, Amy could hope that she was wrong. 

"Maybe not mad then," Laurie said carefully, and he seemed to be searching her expression for something, looking at her very closely until she gave in and met his eyes. "You do know that's all over now, right? I don't feel that way about her anymore."

"I don't know that," Amy said archly, a little panicky, and still unsure where he was going with this. "You never said."

"I thought it was obvious! It's been almost five years."

 _And you pined for her for almost ten,_ Amy thought, a little unkindly. Not that little eleven-year-old Teddy Laurence would've been aware that what he was doing was _pining,_ but it'd been clear enough to the rest of them that he and Jo were a pair from the start. They'd been practically obsessed with each other, when they were kids.

 _Pair of what?!_ Beth would've said. Amy's heart clenched. 

"Well good for you," Amy said, a little shakily. She wanted something else to drink, another tea or perhaps that something 'harder' he'd offered, but she didn't want to ask him to get it for her, and she didn't feel steady enough to stand up, at the current moment. She continued, "I'm glad, Laurie, really I am," and Laurie sighed, clutching the edge of the counter again like he was angry. 

"I can't tell if you're being obtuse or trying to let me down easy," Laurie said, "you're so hard to read sometimes, Ames, I think you have to be doing it on purpose. But then you look at me like that - " he reached out again, and Amy's breath caught in her throat, freezing in place as he touched her face again, in the same spot as before - "and I know you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Because you spend so much time talking yourself down from things, denying yourself things, that you start to believe that you never had them in the first place. Is that what you're doing with me?"

Amy couldn't breathe. "I don't deny myself things," she managed. 

"You do. You turned down CalArts for your mother," Laurie said, still leaning so far over the counter that she couldn't look at anything else but his face. 

"Beth - I couldn't go so far away - not so soon after - " Amy stopped talking abruptly when his face went soft-edged and sad, his hand gentling on her cheek and sliding down to her jaw in a breathtaking caress. "I went to Europe."

"And left six weeks early to help Meg move."

"I - " Amy faltered. "I don't know why we're talking about this."

"Because I invited you to the Cape for the summer, and you told me you had too much homework and then you started going out with Fred fucking Vaughn," Laurie said furiously, his hand still on her jaw. Amy felt flushed, like she had a fever. "And I thought I was imagining things, or being too subtle, or whatever. But now I think - "

"Think what?" Amy interrupted, her ire raised, a panicky feeling rising in her throat. "You can't do this to me, Laurie. You _know_ you can't do this to me."

"Do what?" Laurie asked, loud in his frustration, and finally took his hand back. Amy felt like she might fall over without its weight. 

"This!" Amy exclaimed, suddenly and fiercely irate. "You have to know. After all these years, watching me follow you around like a puppy, you _have_ to know. Don't fuck with me, Laurie, it's beneath you."

Laurie gaped at her for a second, as shocked as Amy had ever seen him. Then his face colored with anger, his hands clenching against the marble again. "A _puppy?_ Did you just call yourself - "

"You know what I meant," Amy bit out, crossing her arms defensively. She felt weird and exposed, her new short hair left her neck bare and she felt like there were eyes staring at the back of it, even though she knew they were alone in the house. Her dress felt too small, her shoulders and her neck felt similarly exposed, her arms felt too long, her face was too flushed. "Just, please. Let's not talk about this anymore, I don't know why you're mad, but - "

"I am _not_ fucking with you," Laurie interrupted, his face twisted, as if in pain. "You really don't think much of me, do you? Jesus."

"It's not about you!" Amy said, angry now by the implication. "It doesn't have anything to do with you! What else am I _supposed_ to think?"

"Supposed to think?" Laurie repeated, stricken. " _Amy_."

Amy breathed heavily, a little light-headed. The silence felt eerie, so abrupt and tense that it made her shoulders draw up almost to her ears. The air felt frozen between them, and angry, rumbling with some sort of building tension, all at the same time. _A thunder snowstorm_ , Amy thought, and then instantly wished she hadn't. 

"I hate when you talk about yourself like that," Laurie finally said, holding the counter like it was the only thing keeping him upright. Amy looked at his throat, his Adam's apple, bobbing as he swallowed, the pale stretch of his collarbone, his angled wrists. Everywhere she looked, his body responded, as if twitching, showing off for her gaze. She swallowed, and her throat felt dry. "Come here."

"What? No," Amy said, startled, but he was standing up. "Laurie, I don't know what we're talking about here, but - "

"You know exactly what we're talking about," Laurie said, and not wanting to wait for her to move, apparently, circled the counter until he was standing in front of her. Amy felt overcome already, just by his proximity. "Would you look at me? God. I hate when you do that, when you stare at the ground, it feels like you can't stand the sight of my face."

"That's not true," Amy said, wincing at the sound of her hoarse voice. She raised her chin though, and met his eye, and instantly felt like passing out again. "Laurie."

"You look so scared of me," Laurie said in reply, sad and forlornly, like he was talking to himself. He reached out with both hands, hovering his palms over her shoulders, hesitating like he was asking for permission. Amy held her breath until the touch connected, and then bit her lip, shivering at the warmth of his skin. "I meant it, you know. About your haircut. It suits you."

"I look like a boy," Amy muttered.

"You don't. You look like yourself, and you're the most beautiful woman I've ever known," Laurie said, and Amy closed her eyes, shaking. Maybe she couldn't bear it. Maybe she wasn't brave enough. "Amy, please."

"How am I supposed to believe you?" Amy whispered, thinking, _things like this don't happen to me._ Amy was a good person, and she knew that, but she had to work for everything she had. Twice as hard as everyone else, it felt like sometimes, and with Laurie - she'd never dared to dream. 

"I'll prove it to you. I swear I will," Laurie said, his face so close she could feel the words' breath on her cheek. "Amy, I drive two hours every week to have lunch with you. I took an undergraduate art class so I could understand what you were talking about when you ranted about your life form teacher - "

"Form drawing," Amy corrected, without thinking. 

"Whatever. I make you laugh, don't I? I try so hard to make you laugh, because I almost never see you do it. I think about you all the time. I dream about you. Amy, _please_ look at me." Amy opened her eyes with no small amount of difficulty, feeling like she might fly apart at any moment. Laurie was already looking back at her, of course. His face was sharp, attentive. His hands tightened on her shoulders as their eyes met and his expression sharpened, as if in triumph. "What we have, you have to know how much it means to me. Your friendship, your advice. Whatever you want to call it - I thought I was being clear, but maybe I wasn't, so let me just say it. I'm a lawyer in training, right? You'd think I'd have learned the direct approach by now." He shook his head, and moved his hands to her face, holding it gently between both palms. "I want to take you to the Cape and teach you how to sail, and then I want to get a really shitty apartment with you and argue about what color to paint the kitchen. I want to make you breakfast and take you back to Paris so you can go to the Louvre every day for a month and not do anything else, like you were going to do before Meg called you back. I want to take art classes with you and take you to fancy restaurants and make scenes at your mother's parties and I don't want to do any of that with anyone else. I loved Jo when I was a teenger, but I'm not a teenager anymore, Amy. And neither are you."

Amy stared at him. "You usually can't paint, in rented apartments," she said, after a long second, and Laurie rolled his eyes at her. "Well! You can't!"

"God, would you shut up?" Laurie said, and then he kissed her. Amy made a very embarrassing noise and then reached up and held onto his wrists for dear life, trembling against his mouth like the teenager he'd just told her she wasn't. Then he took a step forward, further into her space, and she tilted her chin up and heard Beth's voice whispering, in the back of her mind, _shit, Ames, are you a coma patient or what?_ and then suddenly they were _kissing_ kissing, his hands slid into her hair and her mouth opened to his tongue and that was it, game over. Amy felt her heart thumping in her temples, her knees shook where they were pressed open by his hips, she felt like she'd never been kissed before in her life, like here she was brand new, the first moment of a person who'd never existed before, the Amy Who Had Kissed, the upgraded version from that poor kiddo from two minutes ago who didn't know what his hands felt like on the back of her neck, or the sound he made when she bit his bottom lip. _Fuck,_ she thought, and it sounded like a Jo sentiment, but it was still Beth's voice she was hearing, as the running commentary in the back of her head. _Believe it now? You big dummy. You have to reach out and take things, if you want to have them._

Beth was always telling her things like that. _Wake up! Look around! You're beautiful, idiot!_ Amy wasn't sure, really, how to live without that sort of advice, but maybe she could imagine it, in the moments she needed it, and it might be sort of close. As close as she could get to Beth anymore, anyway. 

"Amy," Laurie said as they pulled away, their foreheads leaning together as they caught their breath. Amy squeezed his wrists, and he slid his palms down her neck to her arms, strong, grounding touches that gave Amy the shivers all over. He wasn't a particularly burly man, her Laurie, but he had wide hands and he was tall, tall enough that she sometimes felt weak-kneed when he loomed over her like this, with his shoulders blocking out the light. "Amy - did you mean what you said? That you didn't think I could settle down?"

"I didn't say that," Amy said faintly, still trying to catch her breath. She felt dizzy. 

"You did. Or you implied it. Either one, I can't remember."

"Oh," Amy said, and leaned in to kiss his throat, unable to help himself. He made a wounded noise, like a half-groan, and grabbed her knees so hard with both hands it sent a spike of heat skipping up her spine, like a spark leaping from a campfire. "No," she said, murmuring it into his neck. He smelled like sweat, right there at the base of his neck, and Amy felt like she might melt, picturing him looming over her in a different way, in a different position. "No, I was teasing you."

"Because I could," Laurie said earnestly, spreading his palms out on the meat of her leg right above her knee, his fingers spreading out until his thumbs brushed the inside of her thighs. "I could settle down. I'm gonna be a lawyer, you know. Like a respectable job and everything, with health insurance, and like, I dunno, benefits - "

"Are you proposing to me right now?" Amy asked, with a high-pitched, almost hysterical laugh. "What are you talking about? Not a single thing you've said to me tonight has made any sense at all."

"Oh no, you're just not _listening,_ " Laurie said, lifting her suddenly with both hands, pulling her ass closer to the edge of the chair. Amy gasped, one hand scrambling for a hold against the counter, her legs wrapping more firmly around his hips, her feet brushing the backs of his thighs. "Amy. Do you have to go back to the party?"

"No, holy shit," Amy said, throwing her head back as he kissed her neck, scraping his teeth down the bumpy line of her throat. "Are you serious? Take me upstairs. Oh my God - "

"Are you still tipsy?" Laurie asked, sounding pained and urgent. "You had a drink earlier."

"I have never been more sober in my _life_ ," Amy said honestly, swearing it out loud, like a prayer. 

Laurie let out a huffing breath against her collarbone, his head falling in the rounded space between her neck and shoulder. "Oh God," he said, laughing, "I missed you so much."

"I missed you too," Amy said, tears in her eyes. She could still hear Beth's voice in her head. She thought it was from the time Amy was in the play, sixth or seventh grade - did it matter? - and she'd hated the dress she had to wear, she felt terribly ugly in it, and Beth jumped on her bed screaming, _you look like a lady! You look like a lady!_ over and over until Amy got mad and pushed her onto the floor. Marmee ran upstairs at the noise, furious and ready to scold them, only to find them giggling like mad in a heap beneath the window, tickling and poking each other into hysterics. _You look like a lady! A beautiful, beautiful lady!_ "Laurie. Oh Laurie, I didn't mean what I said, the thing about you being too lazy for a real relationship, I regretted it as soon as it came out of my mouth, I'm so sorry - "

"I deserved it," Laurie said, kissing her ear. "I deserved it." He pulled away, his eyes damp, and Amy started crying for real, still shaky with disbelief at the same time that it felt like this was the moment she'd been waiting for for years, the inevitable conclusion of what she'd felt on that dreary morning of Beth's funeral, standing in the hallway with Laurie as he helped her fix the button that had popped off her coat. _Good as new,_ he'd said, and didn't take his hands off her shoulders all day, standing firmly behind her, at some points even holding her upright. _One step at a time,_ he would text her, every morning in the bleak months afterward. His little messages, spurring her forward: _go outside today. When was the last time you saw the sunset? Did you send in your applications? Draw me something tonight. Anything. Take a picture of what you're working on, I want to see it._ "I want to take you upstairs, Amy, but maybe not right now. I'm too fragile. One more kiss and I'll turn into a pile of dust, right here in front of you."

Amy laughed, pulling him closer with both hands, closer than ever before. "I cannot allow that."

"Also I want to take you to dinner first," Laurie said, murmuring the words into the rounded apple of her cheek. He kissed the skin right beneath her eye, and slid his palms up her back, kissing her again as she shuddered. "And then upstairs." He kissed her again, long and a little filthy, pressing his hips against her stomach as she panted into his mouth. "Maybe a short dinner."

"Sandwiches count," Amy said, breathless again. She tugged at his shirt collar. "Cheese sticks. Cheese sticks on crackers."

"God forgive me for I have sinned," Laurie said, and pulled away far enough to grab her hands, pressing the tops of her knuckles to his mouth. "Now you're supposed to say 'in thought, or in action, my child?'"

"I'm not calling you 'my child,'" Amy said, wrinkling her nose, "no matter the context."

Laurie continued on with his joke, as if she hadn't even spoken, as he often did. Amy loved him. "In thought, Father. Although the lack of action was not for lack of _trying_."

"Are you telling me you think about me naked, or are you scolding me for being obtuse again?" Amy asked. 

"Uh," Laurie said, turning her hands over to kiss her palms instead, "both."

"Alright then," Amy said, tugging their hands down and putting her face in his sightline instead, "well I think about you naked too."

Laurie made a very funny noise. 

"I have some drawings from my form drawing class if you're interested," Amy said. "I never drew your face, because obviously, but I was picturing - "

"You told me there were models!" Laurie interrupted, looking torn between hysterical laughter and a real, genuine sort of scandalized outrage that he usually tried a lot harder to hide. Amy laughed again, feeling giddy from happiness. "You told me you had to stare at some biology major's cock for almost _two hours_ \- do you have _any_ fucking idea how that kept me up at night? My God - "

"There was a biology major, but he was wearing underwear," Amy confessed, and Laurie made another outraged noise. "I was teasing you! I tease you! You're so _easy_ \- "

"God, shut up," Laurie said again, and gave her another kiss that Amy felt all the way down to her toes. She thought, again in Beth's voice, _you're going to have to get used to that,_ and felt a thrill so deep it made her shake in his arms, and feeling it, he held her tighter. "I love you," he said, when they broke away again. "Did I say that yet? You're the best person in my life. I love you."

She was crying again. "Laurie," she said, unable to manage more. 

"That's what I said in my emails," Laurie said, earnest and wide-eyed, like when he was little. The rich neighbor boy, popping up every afternoon to play pretend in their backyard, dragging them all over the woods and mussing up their clothes and then sitting quietly at dinner, smiling up at Marmee and Dad like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Amy has loved him for so long, she'd forgotten what it felt like not to love. Who was she, without it? It scared her sometimes, but not in a bad way. "I thought you'd read them, and ignored them. I was going to act like nothing happened tonight, but then I saw you, and I could tell you hadn't - "

"I wouldn't have! Oh God, I never would've done that to you, I would've said _something_ , Laurie, I would've _replied._ "

"I know," Laurie said, holding her face again. "Then I thought you'd just left them in your inbox, unread. I would have deserved that too. But - oh shit, what if that other Amy March read them?" He laughed. "I can't handle two Amys. One is all I need, and all I've ever needed."

"She probably doesn't exist," Amy said, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. "You probably just sent them out into the universe. Like a message in a bottle."

"I like that," Laurie said, his eyes warm. "A love letter in a bottle, floating out on a virtual sea. You're a romantic, you know," he accused. "You pretend not to be. But you are."

"I know," Amy said softly. "Can I read them? The emails? They must still be in your outbox."

"Maybe," Laurie said, at length, "when I'm feeling less fragile."

"Oh okay. So after dinner then?"

"God. I think you're conditioning me," Laurie said, and she laughed. "Every time someone brings up dinner plans now I'm going to get hard beneath the table, like a sixteen-year-old. This is unfortunate for me, you see Ames, because there are a _lot_ of dinner meetings in law school. Like a ridiculous, pretentious amount."

"Poor thing," Amy said, downturning her mouth into a comical, ironic frown. Laurie laughed, and then she broke and started laughing too, and it felt so very good to laugh. Amy felt like it'd been months, which it had. "I love you too. In case I hadn't said it yet. Have I said it?"

"No," Laurie said, pulling her close again. Amy closed her eyes, imagining herself floating in warm, ocean water, anchored to shore by his familiar arms and hands. "But I think I knew."

 _Told you so! Told you so!_ Amy heard in her head. Well, go figure. Sister's intuition, or whatever. She'd look it up later.


End file.
